When you’re a small-scale business owner, you’re eager to start learning digital marketing and SEO by yourself to save some money and gain some experience on the side. But nothing can be as easy as it seems, especially SEO, which has evolved in terms of complexity and sophistication over the years. The main problem you’ll face with SEO is the fact that results aren’t always instantaneous. Consequently, you can’t always tell if you’re doing a great job or a bad one if it’s too early to assess the traffic that’s been flowing to your website. Frustration may lead you to doubt the whole process, making you unable to determine the exact reason for failure and how to fix it. Here are some indicators of when you need to step up your SEO game:
Understanding SEO
Before we delve into the details that comprise the failure of misemploying SEO strategies, it’s important to understand how exactly SEO works. This technique, at its infancy, was only related to keywords on a website. SEO now includes marketing schemes involving psychology to influence users, social media marketing, sleek website designs and coding, analytics, and many other factors that can affect how an SEO campaign goes. It’s important to understand how inclusive SEO can be before trying to narrow down the criteria of your search.
New business owners are usually eager to grow their SEO campaign as fast as possible without paying attention to the timeline they should set. SEO is a process that takes time because it requires constant analysis, testing, and reviewing. It’s tempting to ask yourself how long for SEO to work its magic on a new campaign but it’s important to note that rushing your SEO doesn’t work even if it appears to. This is because search engines are suspicious of websites that become an overnight success, believing it to involve unjust tactics.
Slow Website
If there is one thing users hate the most during internet browsing, it’s a slow website. The loading speed of your website should never fall below 2-3 seconds, or you’ll be facing huge bounce rates from your visitors. To combat speed problems, make sure that the hosting server is optimized for SEO, that the coding is clean without any problematic plugins, and that device-inclusive speed optimization is doing its job. Most search engines find the loading speed a major ranking factor that affects how the search algorithm defines the usefulness of a website.
Losing Organic Traffic
If you start noticing that your organic traffic is steadily seeping away for no obvious reason, you should focus on growth. While having compelling content is great, without growth and consistency, users are going to be less inclined to revisit your website. If your analytics don’t show a rise in traffic over the last 6 or 12 months, then your campaign isn’t as good as you thought it was. You should take a look into what could have created a significant drop in your organic traffic. Competitors are usually the culprit, and it will require some digging and research to see how your competitors made it work. Take a page from their book and start checking the keywords they use, their landing pages, and anything that can be compared to what you use.
Poor Ranking
While you may find your website’s ranking great for a few keywords, it won’t mean much if those keywords aren’t the most relevant for your field. Certain keywords in specific niches can make or break an SEO campaign. Your goal should be ranking high on search engines for the keywords that describe your field best to overpower your competitors. You can take a look at the keywords the biggest competitors are using then try optimizing your campaign according to their thunder.
Having a Bad Conversion Rate
A lot of new SEO campaigns fall into the common mistake of increasing traffic without matching the increase in conversion. While having a lot of organic traffic on your website is great, without conversion, it will be a waste. This means that the type of visitors you’re attracting may not be the right type needed for your business or website to thrive. This is where optimizing keywords to show the purpose of the website clearly from the get-go is important. Instead of simply using “tables” as a keyword, you can use “discount on tables” if your website sells tables. Use analytic tools to see which keywords are getting the least traffic to see where the culprit is. Update your strategy accordingly if the keywords you are using are vague about the purpose of your website.
Your Content is Too Short
Gone are the days when a 200-300 article could easily be ranked high on search engine result pages. No matter what the type of content is, a search engine’s algorithms define user experience as one of the most valuable metrics. Helpful articles are usually longer than a single page unless the keyword being optimized is rare or branded. Try to replace your short articles and brief content with as much useful content as possible, designed to keep the visitor hooked on the website for the longest time. If you want to overtake your competitor’s mass of content, you can include videos, graphs, and images to make a difference.
Using the Same Old Strategy
When it comes to SEO, standardizing a strategy that works doesn’t mean that it will keep working in the future. It’s pretty easy for your competitors to beat you to the first page of any search engine if you are not up-to-date with the latest updates and changes that affect the algorithm. Search engines are constantly updating and optimizing their search engines to maximize user experience and utility. Keep enhancing your SEO strategy by reading the latest updates and tips from professional trusted sources to stay ahead of your competitors.
Even the most professional SEO experts may sometimes take a long time to determine the reason why a certain strategy is failing. Testing and research are your allies when it comes to SEO because trial and error can sometimes be the only way to find out what went wrong.
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